Terraforming Antarctica: Is it possible to make it habitable without harming the Earth?

Question

Let me explain what I mean by terraforming. Let's say we want Antarctica to be like Scandinavia or Finland. People from all over the Earth would colonise it and build the "United States of Antarctica" or something similar. It would basically become a next-generation USA.

I know that a lot of ice will melt on the continent, and the ocean level will increase. This can be a serious problem for the rest of the planet, but let's say we (or aliens, for example) have the technology to "suck" this water and use it for some industrial purposes (that's irrelevant). I know, however, that changes in temperature may lead to some serious problems in our world. It may disrupt the temperatures around other places, et cetera.

Now for the question: Is it possible to change Antarctica to resemble Northern Europe (temperature) without harming the rest of the globe?

The best answer will contain:

• Is it possible at all to "terraform" the frozen continent (see what I mean by terraforming)

• how can we not harm our planet by doing so

• HOW would that be possible? Exotic technologies of the far future:enabled !

Answer 1

My understanding is that quite alot of Antarctica isn't a proper continent at all. Much of it is floating ice. Were the ice to be removed, you'd get a somewhat smallish archipelago:

Remember, this isn't just the missing outline... that outline is embiggened (I used it, it's a word) in your mind through Mercator projection chicanery.

If this is still big enough for you (if weren't expecting a very large continent anyway), then we have climactic problems as well. It's pretty much fully within the Antarctic circle. We're talking about the inability to do much agriculturally (think something on par with northern Alaska). We're talking about months out of the year where you get to see the sun set briefly at midnight, and on the other side of the year get to have a few weeks of continuous nighttime dark skies (this might only be moderate at the outskirts, but in the interior... oof).

Assuming you don't magic away all the ice, potable water probably isn't a concern. Those glacier you kept up in the mountains will make acceptable rivers along which to site your cities. (Assuming, of course, you can decide what ice you get to keep, and which ice you get to toss.)

So, the real problem, the one you in fact were asking about explicitly in your question, is can you make it an acceptable temperature. And that's dicey. It is possible on Earth for latitude to be somewhat ignored, if ocean currents bless that land. This is why the UK can look as good as it is, while not revving up the motor and sailing their island south through France (which, knowing what I know of them, they might try just to get a good one over on the Frenchies, if they thought they could do it). Atlantic ocean currents typically blast it with un-latitudinally warm water.

It's difficult to imagine that happening at the South Pole though, where these kinds of currents tend to not be. But possibly with a highly advanced science, one could nudge them in a way that both warmed the antarctic and didn't completely pooch-screw the rest of the planet. For a time. Even if there was some magic formula that allowed you to do this, it's not going to be stable for geological periods of time. A few decades, maybe a century. So the magic is going to have to be on an on-going basis.

Someone else will have to answer whether that "magic" can be localized to Antarctica, or if it will have to be global... removing that much albedo from the planet may heat it up considerably, and we might need a way to cool it down in addition to the mojo that's sending warm ocean currents to McMurdo.

The poor penguins. Wtf. Reduced to zoo freezers. You're a cruel, cruel questioner, Mishima.

Answer 2

The short answer is no: if Antarctica could be habitable, it would be already.

• For two months of the year there's virtually no sunlight across most of the continent, and severely reduced light for four months (less than 45° above the horizon) at even the lowest latitudes. Over 95% of Antarctica is beyond the southern latitude equivalent of the Tree Line, the latitude past which trees cannot grow due to lack of sun. This means no agriculture.

• The encircling Southern Ocean blocks all heat transfer from warmer currents. Surface temperatures are below freezing year-round, so again no agriculture.

• Antarctica is a desert, averaging less than 170mm of precipitation a year. No rain, no agriculture.

There is no solution to these factors that doesn't drastically change climates and biomes across the southern hemisphere at a minimum.

Answer 3

Northern Europe indoors?

https://gpnmag.com/news/philips-hosts-led-lighting-event-in-finland/

A nuclear power plant in Antarctica should be enough to warm a lot of greenhouses. You could add more nuclear plants if it got chilly. People would live inside.

Answer 4

Let me explain what i mean by terraforming. Let's say we want Antarctica to be like Scandinavia or Finland.

There are much more accessible parts of the planet that are currently hardly populated (or unpopulated) that would be easier to transform. The interior of Greenland. Much of Northern Canada and Northern Russia. Antarctica would be a much more difficult to operate in and start from. For that matter the population density in large tracts of Australia and the US are equally empty and, again, more practical targets.

Changing any of these regions is essentially going to wreck the entire globe's climate. Even a change to make Antarctica more like Finland would be devastating.

Long, long, long before you try any of those people will starting living in larger and more densely populated highrise and subsurface population centers - higher and deeper.

People from all over the Earth would colonise it and build "United states of Antarctica"or something similar.It would basically become a next generation USA.

Unless you happen to have a magic formula for world peace and to make humans actually get along with each other and stop being greedy that's not going to happen. Instead countries and corporations will compete for access to the regions resources (as they're now going to be unlocked and more easily exploited. Unless the UN gets a huge army, the UN will be what it usually is in these contexts - a referee who can't stop the players arguing but can tell them off later.

I know that a lot of ice will melt on the continent,and ocean level will increase. This can be a serious problem for the rest of the planet,but let's say we (or aliens,pour example) have technology to "Suck" this water and use it for some industrial purposes(That's irrelevant).

Extremely relevant. It's a vast quantity of water and it will end up where ? Even a small fraction of that water is devastating to the climate (and is one of the important factors in global warming). You'd be talking about basically all of it (maybe half left as permafrost at best) which is way, way, way beyond global warming. So it's essential you have a place to put this water where it won't do harm.

I know,however,that changes in temperature may lead to some serious problems on our world. It may distrupt the temperatures around other places,et cetera.

Wipe of all sea life, make the entire rest of the globe uninhabitable, wipe out all arable crops (and the places to grow them) and possibly make the planet as hot as Venus by a runaway greenhouse effect.

Now for the question:Is it possible to change Antarctica to resemble Northern Europe (Temperature) without harming the rest of the globe?

No.

If you want to live in Antarctica (why when so many better places exist ?), then you build enclosed structures with closed environments. These would be orders of magnitude easier to build (although still a major task) and even more magnitudes easier to do safely, without affecting anywhere else (or more precisely with minimal effects to the climate). Underground is an option.

Best answer will contain:

Just so you understand how SE work : members decide what a best answer is, not the OP by voting on their views. They can use any criteria they want to judge what they consider "best".

HOW would that be possible? Exotic technologies of the far future:enabled

As I say it's not practical to do it the way you want. It's far simpler (in some reasonable future) to be able to build and maintain large surface or underground structures in the Antarctic which have e.g. geothermal heat sources for energy and grow their own food.

The trickiest part would be stopping the heat from such settlements from altering the environment locally (again to global detriment). This would require some form of heat transfer mechanism that moved that heat to were it would do less harm. Not impossible, but well beyond anything I can imagine. It's way beyond me to say if the geothermal option is truly viable (it's probably plausible at the story level anyway).

Answer 5

You've written:

let's say we (or aliens, for example) have the technology to "suck" this water and use it for some industrial purposes

If you're assuming we have the power to remove that much water, then other technologies might be possible too. In particular, we could build some orbital mirrors, and reflect some sunlight down onto Antarctica. The effort needed to launch all those mirrors into space would be considerable (even if we used a very lightweight tinfoil-like mirror with just some webbing to hold it in place). But the effort for this might be less than the effort required to get rid of all the meltwater it would produce.

Adding sunlight in this way would increase global warming, so we'd probably want to subtract some sunlight from equatorial regions to balance it out. If we decrease the temperature over the Sahara Desert, it might generate rainfall and let us terraform the desert too.

There's a bit more on this topic in Can satellites decrease global warming?.

Answer 6

Is it possible to change Antarctica to resemble Northern Europe (temperature) without harming the rest of the globe?

You mentioned the far future. How much time do you have?

Scientists believe that in 250 million years, continental drift may lead to a continental arrangement as such:

Source: Mattias Green, Hannah Sophia Davies, Joao C. Duarte: What planet Earth might look like when the next supercontinent forms – four scenarios? November 2018, The Conversation

As you can see, parts of Antarctica are sandwiched between India/China, Australia, and South America. Although I'm not aware of any climate model simulations for such a continental arrangement, if atmospheric circulation resembles the one today, Antarctica would have a tropical to subtropical climate, possibly with large parts dominated by deserts, comparable to Australia today. Such continental drift doesn't happen overnight. As stated, this is a forecast for 250 million years into the future. In the transition from a polar icecap climate to a (sub)tropical climate, somewhere along the way in the next tens to hundreds of millions of years, the climate of Antarctica will probably resemble the climate that Northern Europe has today.

Whoever lives on Earth by then, if anyone, may well have exotic technology. They probably won't be able to stop continental drift. I imagine the lake or inland sea between Australia, North America, and South America may be a popular tropical tourist destination. Will you use your exotic technology to send a post card back to the 21st century?

Answer 7

No. In theory you certainly could do it but only at the cost of decimating the worlds current population centers and continental ecologies.

The South polar region was habitable in the Jurassic and Cretaceous eras albeit continental drift had not yet split it up into the worlds current land masses. Point is at least the fringe (coastal regions) of present antarctic would support diverse forests, mainly conifers and ferns as well and a rich under story of other plants at least roughly similar to the regions you've specified. Albeit there would still be long cold dark winters and the inner part of the continent might have more of a tundra like environment.

The issue is that this period was much, much warmer than present day Earth. So if your going to 'warm up' Antarctica (and presumably Greenland and northern Canada etc) you have to be prepared to radically alter the climate on the rest of the Earths continents which will all be much warmer. Damaging the ecologies of each it turn - and that includes all of Earths current agricultural lands.

Tell you what, lets do absolutely nothing about global warming and find out. Human civilization be dammed, its an interesting if long term experiment.

Answer 8

Yeah. Just move it.

Maybe to about the middle of the Indian Ocean as a kind of sister continent to Australia.

That solves the ice problem.

how can we not harm our planet by doing so

This planet is pretty much indestructible. Greenland used to be green and without nearly as much ice on its surface. We'd just be balancing this out with a mirror change in the Southern hemisphere.

Bear in mind that Antarctica moved to get to where it is, and has changed an awful lot over time.

HOW would that be possible? Exotic technologies of the far future:enabled !

Underground volcanic activity and plate tectonics. The mid-Atlantic rift that separated Pangaea was pretty drastic, and was propelled by irresistible volcanic activity. Simply learn how to energize and agitate the appropriate underground magma bubbles, and the upper mantle and crust will be loosey-goosey enough to make the shift happen.

Answer 9

It is theoretically possible to build a totally self enclosed totally recycled habitat anywhere, such as in a moon base or an artificial space habitat.

So possibly such enclosed habitats will be built in the future, even on Earth, where they might be used to creat artifical ecospheres for humans to live in, and thus reduce human interaction with the natural ecosystem of Earth, and reduce human damage to the natural ecosystem of Earth.

And if people can build such self enclosed habitats and ecosystems anywhere in space or anywhere on Earth, they could build them in Antarctica also.

Answer 10

Why do you want to warm up Antartica to make it habitable? It depends of the exact motive of your population to live in Antarctica, but if it is just about pilgrims having nowhere else to settle down, then you don't absolutely need to warm up Antarctica.

As another answer says, you can just use powerful energy plants (nuclear or other energy sources) to create habitations where the temperature is acceptable. When people go outside houses, they just have to wear warm clothes. This would be similar to the Arab Emirates where people leave in climatized buildings, and go only part of the time outside where the sun is too powerful and temperatures are too high.

Now, the question is what do you live with in such a situation: Your people could have an economy based on the followings:

• Extended fisheries and algae farming plants as a substitute to conventionnal farming
• Touristic economy, as Antarctica is a beautiful place
• Services economy, or even industrial economy: don't forget that most of the year, people commute between their house, subway and their place of work without being outside: in Antarctica, this would mean people don't suffer from the low temperature